"They spent their nights and weekends knocking on doors, shaking hands, providing yard signs and selling T-shirts. Somewhere in their city of 47,000, they believed, were others as outraged by the city's deal to let a mining company dig into the hillside that stood sentry above their San Gabriel Valley neighborhoods.

But when Azusa residents went to the polls to decide the fate of the mining operation, the grass-roots opposition was buried.